Slashdot Mirror

I have no problem with "just cause" if there are avenues for communication and appeal. However...

My app was kicked out of the App Store after 12 months. It was the best app for cricket scores out there - #1 app in almost all cricket-playing countries, great online and offline reviews, featured by Apple several times etc. All of the scores etc for it were obtained from legal sources. However, the developers for the official app of the Indian Premier League (sort-of international cricket competition in March/April every year) complained to Apple that my app infringed on their exclusive rights to provide information on IPL matches and, after a bit of back-and-forth arguments between myself and them, Apple pulled the app.

Now, it's not the fact that they pulled it without "just cause" that upset me, but that they refused to comment and communicate about it in any way. I repeatedly sent emails to various official (and unofficial) contacts at Apple to seek clarification, complain and get the app re-instated, but not a peep from anyone. I even sent an official DMCA Counter Notification and not a single response on that either.

After no word from anyone for a long while, I had to close the service even for existing users who already had the app on their iPhones 'cos I couldn't afford to keep paying for the match data feeds with no revenues. Apple's decision has cost me thousands of dollars, but again, what really upsets me is the total lack of professionalism and common courtesy that they have displayed in this.

You only have to do that if you have a low-quality product. My app, Virtual Cricket, competes in a reasonably crowded segment (cricket scores, push alerts etc) and competes against some pretty heavy competition (ESPN, BSkyB etc).

However, I have a quality product and it was recognised as such by Apple who selected the app as the featured app in the App Store. This did more for my sales than spamming online forums etc.

Lesson: quality wins in the end.

To your first point, that's the mistake I made as well. The trick (as I discovered later) is, when you first release your app, to put the release date well in advance (say a month). When the app is approved, you can then change the release date to "tomorrow" and it will then show up at the top of the "New Releases" when the time comes.

You can apparently also do this after the app has been released, but I haven't tried it.

Regarding your second point - yes, it is very hard for small entries to be noticed. My app, Virtual Cricket, competes with the apps of big names such as ESPN, BSkyB, English Cricket Board etc. I believe (very objectively, of course) that my app (cricket scores, commentary, news etc) is better than all of them, but I don't have the resources of a big website to throw behind the marketing nor the brand that catches users' attention.

But you just need to persevere, try to market the app in as many ways as you can with the limited resources that you have and hope that users will notice the quality of your work and that the cream will rise to the top (eventually).

Yes, I noticed the weather example - the developer was trying to spam the "New Releases" section of the App Store. But the approval process is somewhat random. For my app, Virtual Cricket (cricket scores), it sometimes takes just 3 days to get an approval for a new version and sometimes almost two weeks. It is extremely frustrating.

> more ways to nickel-and-dime gamers to death

This is not just about gamers. Yes, I'm sure that there will be games that will take advantage of this by selling more levels etc as well as having some dress-my-pet-toy type of games which will be completely over the top.
However, this is really about enabling serious developers to recover more money from the investments they made to develop serious apps with serious content. In my own case - sports apps that have premium quality commentary and live scores. I can't afford the costs for the existing professional data content in my app with just regular sales, let alone to add all of the other features I want to add to it (eg. video highlights, notifications/alerts, fantasy cricket etc). In-app purchasing will allow more serious users to have access to premium content - same as the real world.
By the way, my app is Virtual Cricket - yes, a completely shameless plug, but it's on topic at least :-)

As per my comment to the other story, the in-game purchasing is critical for me as a developer. For the features in my app, I'm practically giving it away at $1.
The app, Virtual Cricket, gives the users access to live scores and commentary for the international cricket games. The cost of professional data sources for this sort of content is not small, as you can imagine. For me to just brake even, I would need to have a very high sustained level of new customers each and every day.
In-app purchases however will allow the conversion of the existing customer base for subscription to higher-end content (eg. fantasy cricket), where I can look at recovering some of the invested money.
This is where the market must go to go away from your iBeer and iFart type of efforts which do nothing to promote the platform as a serious marketplace.

As a developer, I'm a lot more excited by the 3.0 software than the hardware itself. Yes, the new hardware will (hopefully) increase the market size, but the 3.0 software has some really exciting things from a business perspective. The key to these things is in-app purchase capability.
Apple has had enough feedback from serious developers that the bottom end of the market ($1-$2 apps) is too low to sustain any serious development/business effort. The ability to make additional money from the customers to whom you've already sold your $1 app (ie. practically given it away at that price), will satisfy the existing serious developers and hopefully attract other ones.
The current model is simply not sustainable. For me for example, I sell my app, Virtual Cricket, at $1. With the cost of the professional data sources which provide live scores and commentary to all cricket matches around the world, this would require a very high sustained level of new customers just to break even, let alone make money. In-game purchases will allow some conversion of the existing customer base for subscription to higher-end content etc.
This is where the market must go to go away from your iBeer and iFart type of efforts which do nothing to promote the platform as a serious marketplace.

I'm an iPhone developer and memory crashes are all to do with badly written code. iPhone SDK has fantastic debugging capabilities that let you catch memory leaks and easily fix them - much better than any other mobile platform SDK I've ever worked with. The problem is ultimately that everyone wants to be an iPhone developer and make millions in the App Store after picking up a book and watching an online tutorial or two, without knowing a single thing about development outside of a web scripting language or two.
Apple also used to be really strict about testing for this during the app approval process, but it looks like they relaxed the standards. Hmm, I wonder why... I've recently seen apps which crash after 3-4 minutes of use.
By the way, check out my first app - for the cricket lovers around the world: Virtual Cricket for iPhone